I probably should have created a War category, but screw it, too late now. Onward. A couple readers have mentioned that they were intending to donate to Christopher Allbritton but hadn’t gotten around to it. Donate now if you intend to; he’s about to leave on his trip (original) and it turns out — who’d have guessed? — that he won’t be able to get to PayPal once he’s in Iraq.

Not much else to do with my night but mock the Oscars; I wasn’t gonna, but the opening montage reminded me of how painfully bad some of the Oscar winners have been. Thus, they deserve it. It’ll all go in this post so anyone reading this on Livejournal is missing all the fun.

There’s a new blog out there called The Command Post. It’s kind of a group news warblog, but the bias of the contributors is distinctly conservative and they can’t help but let it seep through. A lot. So t.rev dropped me a line pointing out this post (original), which discusses the Fedayeen Saddam, Saddam’s — actually, they sound like his special forces units. The poster compares them to the NKVD, and to illustrate the nature of the NKVD, he links to… Delta Green (original). As in the game. He links to a discussion of how the NKVD battled a secret US intelligence group over Cthulhoid horrors. ...

Over the course of the last couple of months, David Neiwert has been writing a series of articles entitled “Rush, Newspeak and facism” on the potential for fascism in the United States. He’s a journalist who has extensive experience in this field; his articles are well worth your time. I don’t really have anything to say about these, which makes me a bad blogger, but sometimes you just have to pass along the important links. ...

Really, it’s like fish in a barrel. Via A Whole Lotta Nothing.

The evidence is in; some people really want an excuse to hate. So OK, Dixie Flatline. Hate away. Put yourself in that dangerous little corner of the human psyche. What happens when you cage yourself is simple; on Sundays, the tourists walk by and take pictures and discuss your strange case. Consider me a tourist. Here’s my discussion. In your rant, cloaked in the pretense of rationality, you claim that the loyalties of American Muslims must be suspect. You claim that we must watch them closely; the implication, bitter as quinine in your mouth, is that there is no other way to be safe from the threat. ...

One of the common worries expressed by anti-war protestors was the possibilty of backlash during the war. We were forced to close our embassy in Pakistan yesterday, and all US citizens are advised to leave Pakistan. Why? Seems there are intensifying protests over there, and things are getting violent. Meanwhile, the Instapundit thinks Iraqis who are happy to be liberated are my worst nightmare. As Unqualified Offerings notes, my worst nightmares involve things like militant Islamic coups in Pakistan, a nation that has a number of nuclear weapons. Iraqi citizens happy to be liberated? That’s a good thing. ...

I’m in Harvard Square, near the Pit, listening to a not bad band pound out the Rolling Stones at full electrified volume. I walked through the Yard just now, and looked up at the third floor of Weld, and realized I wanted to record it. It’s odd; I remember Weld so distinctly, but that was onlu Harvard Summer School, and freshman year in the Yard has faded. I blame Jeanie and Fern. How else? ...

Another useful resource this week: the BBC’s reporter diaries. The Agonist is also good — Sean-Paul is doing a good job of keeping up with the news. His head will explode within days, no doubt. Turkey has OKed US overflight, finally. There was a lot of back and forth about this, mostly related to whether or not the US was going to let Turkish troops into Northern Iraq. Turkey wants to make sure the Kurds don’t form their own state, and will do so by force as necessary. No word as to what the final deal was, but Turkey reasserted that it would send troops in after they announced they’d open airspace. That’s not good. ...

Two things. First, Amiri Baraka is an idiot and a pig and quite possibly a racist. (Although, you know, do some research (original). “It is a narrow nationalism that says the white man is the enemy… Nationalism, so-called, when it says ‘all non-blacks are our enemies,’ is sickness or criminality, in fact, a form of fascism.” You’ll never guess who wrote that. Still, set that aside: once you start with calling people a whore during your lectures, you get slotted into the idiot and pig categories. At the very least.) ...